zombies

Right before heading out to E3 this weekend, I had a chance to meet with Chillingo to check out some of the titles that the company will be bringing to the iPhone and iPad this summer. In my initial glance at the lineup, I saw a lot of the projects leaning toward the undead. There’s Zombie Wonderland, Pro Zombie Soccer, Zombie Escape, but a few of the nonzombie games did pique my interest. Most notably, Knight’s Rush, Park Mania HD and Inkvaders (iPad) come to mind. Here’s a quick roundup of the games that have my attention.

Zombie Wonderland (iPhone and iPad): You’re a survivor of a zombiepacalypse. You’re in a house with a shotgun and you have to defend it from a horde of raging undead. That’s the premise of this siege-defense shooter. You have to gun down the zombies before they stumble into the house. They do this by going to the windows of the four-sided home and blasting anything outside. If zombies do get in, the game’s not over. You’ll have to kill the undead and mop up the guts, which will waste precious time that you could be using to defend yourself. Expect plenty of ways to upgrade your house through the different levels and new locales, which includes a bar and other areas.

Parking Mania HD (iPad): Because Apple won’t allow flash on the iPad, you can’t play the great Time Waster, Parking Perfection. But that’s OK because Chillingo is publishing a viable alternative. Parking Mania HDis a top-down driving game. It uses the accelerometer to allow players to turn the vehicles. There’s a gas pedal and reverse controls on the side of the screen. What this game does better than Parking Perfection is the variety vehicles (They let you go around in big rigs, a truck with a boat and a tractor) and the smart level design which includes actual traffic. It expands on what was an already intriguing premise.

I am a walking apocalypse to zombies. The undead tremble before me like shivering trees. If they had nightmares, I would be their Freddy Krueger. If zombies could say something more than “braiiiiiiiiiiins,” they’d call me “diablo amarillo” because of my yellow jacket.

As the protagonist, Chuck Greene, I found myself in a game show type atmosphere in Fortune City. The thinly veiled stand-in for Las Vegas has everything one would expect from Sin City. There’s slot machines and car prizes at the center of its casinos. Kiosks dot the covered thoroughfare because I assume Fortune City like Vegas is extremely hot. The only differences between the two are the zombies.

They roam freely about Fortune City like flocks of pigeons, and in this Dead Rising 2 demo, I had to kill 20,000 experience points worth in 10 minutes. That’s a boatload of zombies. It’s almost two-thirds of them. If I accomplished the feat, I would win a special prize.

In the Time Waster, you play as a survivor in a pink track suit, and you’ll be running from a horde of the undead. Of course, a zombie game wouldn’t be a zombie game if it didn’t have guns. ZOMGies has plenty. You move around with WASD or arrow keys. You point and shoot with the mouse. Switching weapons is easy as pressing the space bar.

The game reminds me of a scrolling shooter like Gradiusexcept the survivor would be the Vic Viper and the zombies would be space ships and creatures gunning for you. While literally running and gunning, you’ll have to dodge obstacles like corpses and exploding barrels (hint, hint).

As you progress through the game, you’ll find new weapons and encounter stronger zombies. At the end of each stage, you’ll find shelter and have a chance to see your score and reconfigure your weapons for the next go-around.

Play time: Each of the beginning stages are short. They last less than a minute as your survivor runs from Point A to Point B. As you progress through the game, each level gets harder as the zombies start to swarm more and more. It took me a good five minutes to finish level 8, but ZOMGies has enough there to keep you busy for the dead spots in your day.

In a show of solidarity with our Another Hole in the Head cover package, let’s talk zombies.

I addressed the slow- vs. fast-moving zombie controversy in another column. Now, it’s not the speed that matters but the volume.

The undead keep showing up: In literature, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” attributed to Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen, has become a best-selling novel (trade paper) and will soon be made into a movie.

“Romeo & Juliet vs. The Living Dead,” a low-budget indie, will have its world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival on June 26.

And, in an attempt at a world record, filmmaker Chris Boyle is inviting you to dress up — or, perhaps more accurately, dress down — as a zombie for his upcoming mockumentary “I Spit On Your Grave.”

All you have to do is show up — in the proper togs and makeup — at the Big Chill music festival in London in August. Boyle is looking to swell his cast with enough undead extras to make the “Guinness Book of World Records” for the “most amount of zombies captures on camera.”

Unlike the plot of the universally reviled 1981 film of the same name, the mockumentary’s futuristic saga has the undead taking over the world after a virus wipes out mankind.

Apparently, these zombies like to party at summer festivals.

If you plan to go, remember: Plane fares are really low these days.

On Bay Area screens

Superfest Classics Disability Film Festival: Films that won awards in previous competitions in Superfest: The world’s longest-running international disability film fest promotes movies “meeting the highest standards of artistic merit, diversity and authentic portrayals of the disability experience.”

You have to love these possibly leaked trailers. They look like they’re shot by Hud from Cloverfield, and usually, the quality is so bad that you don’t know what you’re looking at.

But this possibly leaked trailer for Dead Rising 2 does look promising. It hints that the incident at Willamete Mall (Why are all zombie attacks called “incidents”?) has irrevocably changed life in America.